Forcing Chinese Muslims to sell alcohol and smokes is an obvious ploy to hurt Islam.

The Chinese government had a problem. Faced with rising discontent over its repressive rule in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang, the government wanted to find a way to weaken Islam in the region. But how does a government weaken a religion?

The government started by forbidding government employees and their children from attending mosques. Making it illegal for the governing class to attend certain worship services is surely one way to weaken a religion. That has not occurred in the United States, although the federal government has sent undercover agents into Native American religious ceremonies and criminally prosecuted them for their traditional use of eagle feathers.

Next, the Chinese government outlawed women from wearing veils and men from wearing long beards on buses. Forcing people to hide their religious identity is another logical way to stifle religion. That has not occurred here either, although it has occurred in other liberal Western democracies. In France, for example, a 15-year-old schoolgirl was recently sent home for the offense of … wearing a long skirt. The principal judged the skirt to be an obvious sign of the girl's Muslim faith, and French law forbids students from wearing even the most basic signs of religious faith, such as Jewish yarmulkes and noticeable Christian crosses.

China's third step to weaken Islam, though, strikes much closer to home. The government is now forcing Muslim store owners to do something their religion forbids: sell alcohol and cigarettes and display them prominently. Muslim storeowners who refuse face massive penalties, and have been told they will "see their shops sealed off, their business suspended and legal action pursued against them."

Why the coercion? The government claims the mandate is designed "to provide greater convenience to the public." But that claim is hard to take seriously. The government's interest is not so much in providing public access to cigarettes and alcohol generally, but in making sure that those products come from particular parties — namely the religious objectors. Local party officials are at least candid enough to admit it, saying, "We have a campaign to weaken religion here and this is part of that campaign."

Sadly, China's cigarette-and-alcohol mandate bears a troubling resemblance to our own federal government's contraception mandate, which forces religious ministries like the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide health plans that include access to free contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.

Like the bureaucrats in Xinjiang, our government claims that its mandate is needed for the convenience of the public. But that claim is hard to take seriously. Contraceptives are widely available from drugstores, websites, and even vending machines, and they are easy to obtain. That is presumably why former Health and Human Services secretary Sebelius acknowledged, before the mandate was even issued, that contraceptives were already "the most commonly taken drug in America by young and middle-aged women." Apparently most people were able to get contraceptives just fine without help from nuns. And now that the government has created insurance exchanges, the government's argument is even more ridiculous — the government can easily get insurance plans covering contraceptives and abortion to anyone it wants to.

So if contraceptives are widely available, and if the government can provide access to them through its own existing programs, then why is the government still aggressively fighting with the Little Sisters and other ministries? Unfortunately, easy access is not enough; the government refuses to yield until they can force religious ministries to accept contraceptives as a forced part of the religious ministries' health plans. And that is why scores of challenges to the contraceptive mandate have continued for years: The religious ministries cannot violate their religion, and they understand — as the Chinese bureaucrats in Xinjiang obviously understand — that being forced to publicly violate one's faith weakens that faith.

Maybe our own government just doesn't understand this key point and that is why it insists on forcing the Little Sisters and other religious ministries to let the government use their plans to distribute contraceptives. If so, then the government should look at China and aspire to do better. If the goal is not to weaken religion but just to expand access, then the government can do that through its existing programs — without involving nuns.

The more frightening possibility, of course, is that our government knows precisely what it is doing, and that it wants to pressure religious groups to change their beliefs about contraception and abortion. If that is the case, then the government's dogged insistence on the forced involvement of religious ministries in contraception is no better than China bullying Muslims to sell alcohol: an effort to weaken a religious belief that the government dislikes.

Regardless of the government's motives, we should all be grateful that the Little Sisters and other religious ministries have the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment to protect their civil rights in court. If only the Muslim shopkeepers in China had the same protection.

Mark L. Rienzi is senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and a professor of Constitutional Law at the Catholic University of America.